The Most Blissfully Trump-Twitter-Free Place in America

Welcome to the money-laundering trial of Paul Manafort, where facts still matter.

No matter how theatrical or misguided the trial is, to spend a day in the courtroom is to be reminded of a different era in our civic life, when basic facts were not subject to the President’s endless, self-serving, and utterly misleading spin.

Late on Wednesday morning, Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, stared directly at Rick Gates, his longtime deputy turned accuser, sitting on the stand a few feet away from him in the Alexandria courtroom where Manafort is on trial for an array of financial crimes. Manafort’s lawyer was about to get one final shot at Manafort’s betrayer, and he had saved something sensational for last.

Already, Gates had spent eight hours over three days testifying about Manafort’s alleged scheme to hide millions of dollars in overseas accounts from the U.S. government. Gates had told jurors about the vast payments that Manafort received—some sixty-five million dollars over four years, according to prosecutors—and concealed in accounts in Cyprus, the small Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the United Kingdom. In damning detail, Gates had recounted how his boss, a Reagan-era Republican operative who went on to work for a variety of unsavory dictators overseas before landing at Trump’s side, kept his money in secret bank accounts, just like the “Ukrainian businessmen” who paid Manafort the millions now in question.

On Tuesday, Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, had forced Gates to acknowledge his own “secret life”: an affair with a woman in London, which he funded in part by stealing thousands of dollars from Manafort. Downing had methodically pointed out that Gates, along with being the star witness in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s first prosecution, was also a liar, an embezzler, and a philanderer. Gates, who cut a plea deal with Mueller in order to avoid up to a hundred years in prison, had admitted it all. On Wednesday morning, Downing had one last round of questioning for Gates, and he got right to the salacious point.

“Do you recall telling the Office of Special Counsel you actually engaged in four extramarital affairs?” Downing asked.

Before Downing could even finish the question, prosecutors objected. Then all the lawyers approached the bench to speak with the crotchety senior U.S. District Court judge T. S. Ellis III, who is presiding over the trial. A machine played white noise to mask any sound from their conference. The spectators filling the court’s hard wooden benches buzzed. When Downing returned from the huddle, he made no further mention of affairs, rephrasing his question as a demand to know, more generally, whether Gates’s secret life had extended throughout the years covered by the case.

“Mr. Downing, I’d say I made many mistakes, over many years,” Gates replied. And with that, his testimony was over. Ashen-faced, Gates left the stand.

The trial of Paul John Manafort, Jr., is the first, but almost certainly not the last, to result from Mueller’s investigation. Whatever else it ends up proving, the proceedings have already shown in a most unflattering light the men President Trump chose to run his campaign and, in Gates’ case, organize his Presidential Inauguration. In less than two weeks, Mueller’s prosecutors have laid bare their lying, cheating, and stealing while fleecing a struggling post-Soviet country. Indelible images of greed and political cynicism have emerged, from Manafort’s fifteen-thousand-dollar ostrich jacket (part of the staggering fifteen million dollars prosecutors say he spent to maintain his lavish life style) to his unabashed influence peddling even after he was dumped by the Trump campaign. The President may have, inadvertently, provided the most obvious frame for understanding the nature of their crooked business when he complained, in a tweet on the opening day of the trial, that under Mueller, Manafort was treated worse in court than even the “legendary mob boss” Al Capone.

So far, however, the case has stayed resolutely away from the primary focus of Mueller’s probe: the Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Trump or his associates colluded with it. In the eight hours or so I was in the courtroom on Wednesday, the words “Trump” and “Russia” were never used. Instead, Judge Ellis has restricted prosecutors to the narrowest possible presentation of their case, instructing them throughout the trial’s first eight days to stick closely to proving that Manafort did, in fact, engage in the thirty-two counts of income-tax evasion, money laundering, obstruction, and bank fraud with which he is charged. The judge, clearly, does not want the case to be about Trump, or Russia, or 2016. Nor does he want it to be about the uniquely Washington form of kleptocracy that Manafort and Gates represented, as they made millions advising the corrupt, Russian-linked thug who ruled Ukraine until a 2014 street revolution sent him scurrying into Russian exile. Prosecutors cannot show jurors pictures of the lavish real estate that Manafort purchased with Ukraine’s money, Ellis has ruled. Nor can they see what seven figures’ worth of landscaping looks like, or hear testimony from the bespoke tailors about just how one actually goes about spending more than a million dollars on clothing.

In 2014, when Manafort was being paid four million dollars a year to advise the Ukrainian President on his government’s policies—a stunning fact that was mentioned as an aside in Judge Ellis’s courtroom the other day—Ukraine ranked in between Bangladesh and Uganda as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. Its residents earned, on average, a few hundred dollars a month, as its corrupt élite funded Manafort’s fashion excesses and Gates’s London trysts. Ukraine was run by a crooked cabal in league with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Manafort was their “very useful servant,” as the Ukraine expert Anders Åslund put it to me, finding ways to keep its “budding dictator” in power in exchange for all those millions. The jurors won’t hear about it, but it’s still true: the country was a corrupt oligarchy, even if Judge Ellis told prosecutors to stop using the term “oligarch” during the trial.

Most accounts of the trial, in fact, have been dominated by Ellis, the testy, seventy-eight-year-old Reagan appointee who rarely misses an opportunity for a cutting aside. The Times called him a “Little Caesar” in a profile on Thursday, and, after spending a day in his courtroom this week, it was clear why: Ellis loves being the center of attention, even if doing so means bullying and reprimanding prosecutors and, at times, actually taking over the questioning of their witnesses. On Wednesday, Ellis blasted a prosecutor, Greg Andres, for responding “yeah” instead of “yes” to him. (“This is not an informal proceeding,” the judge thundered.) Seasoned courtroom observers told me later that they thought Ellis was actually being more restrained than he had been earlier in the trial.

Commentators from across the political spectrum have started wondering whether Ellis’s heavy hand will undermine prosecutors’ credibility with the jury. “I’m not happy with this judge,” the Fox News senior legal analyst Andrew Napolitano said this week, criticizing Ellis’s “extraordinary bias” against the prosecutors. On Thursday, the Mueller team filed a formal written protest to the judge about what it deemed an inaccurate and unfair reprimand from the day before. “I may well have been wrong,” Ellis eventually conceded in remarks to the jury. “This robe doesn’t make me anything other than human.”

Yet no matter how theatrical or even misguided Ellis is, to spend a day in his courtroom is to be reminded of a different, pre-Trump era in our civic life—in a good way. An era when basic facts were not subject to endless distortion and truth still mattered. When the President himself could not intrude on the proceedings with his endless, self-serving, and utterly misleading Twitter spin.

Electronics are, mercifully, if inconveniently, banned from the Alexandria federal courthouse, meaning that it may be one of the most Trump-free spaces on the planet at the moment. Instead of staring down at their phones and laptops, the journalists and other spectators are forced to actually listen as the case unfolds, without a constant stream of instant commentary to shape their thinking. (“I tell everyone it’s like living in 1994,” one of the reporters on the Manafort beat told me.) The self-contained Ellis courtroom is that rare place today where there is presumed to be a truth that is real and verifiable. A place where the facts are worth so much to the public that the U.S. government had a forensic accountant meticulously match the flow of money from Manafort’s overseas bank accounts to his invoices from luxury-car dealers, couturiers, decorators, and the like. I found the testimony of the accountant, in its own way, just as compelling as Gates’s rendition of his life as the henchman of an international high-roller. Forget “alternative facts.” Here are actual ones. And, yes, they are damning.

But of course we still live in Trump’s world. On Thursday morning, the President interrupted his extended New Jersey golf vacation to tweet. The subject on his mind, as usual, was the Mueller investigation. He complained about the “illegally brought Rigged Witch Hunt run by people who are totally corrupt and/or conflicted.” Reading it, I wished I was still in Judge Ellis’s courtroom, listening to testimony about actual corruption. By those with whom Donald Trump chose to surround himself. Who cares if the judge is a jerk?

Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Trump’s Washington.